Some of you might know that I'm a fan of letting go of goals, or living/working without goals ...

So you might be surprised to know that this week, I decided to encourage my kids to create 2014 goals and a plan for accomplishing those goals.

What gives? Well, I thought I'd use goals as a teaching/learning tool in our little unschooling adventure. I've found goals to be unnecessary for accomplishing things, but I don't believe goals are evil, especially if you use them right. And they can be a useful tool to learn about something.

In this case, I'm helping the kids to learn about achieving things. It can be easy in life, and in unschooling, to let the days pass by without doing anything important or exciting. That's fine if you have a job and are getting a regular paycheck, but if you own your own business or are an unschooler, you don't have that luxury. You can take a few days off, but eventually you're going to have to produce.

And so how do you get motivated to do something good? Well, there are lots of ways. Some possibilities:

Find a project that excites you and get up each day looking forward to working on it. This is what I do most of the time. You don't need a goal to help you get up and work on something exciting.

Find a partner to work on something with you. Being accountable to a partner helps you stick to the project.

Be a part of a team doing something awesome.

Be a part of an accountability group -- people who are working on different things, but hold each other accountable for what they're doing. This can be a formal group or just your friends checking in on each other.

Help people. When you have someone to help, it motivates you to do stuff.

Find inspiration. Surround yourself with inspirational people.

Declare your goals or habits or project publicly. Report publicly.

Get motivated by needing to pay the bills. Go out and find clients or customers.

There are other possibilities, but you can see that there's not just one way to get motivated to achieve.

Goals aren't necessary for all of these, but setting and working on goals can teach you about a bunch of them. Once you've learned about how these work, perhaps you can do them without goals if you like. Either way is fine.

So what am I doing with the kids?

Here's what we're doing as a family -- this includes me, Eva, and four kids (ages 17, 14, 9, and 7):

We reflected on what we did in 2013. This helps us to feel good about what we accomplished, learn about what worked and what didn't, and think about what we'd like to carry on from 2013 to 2014.

We brainstormed ideas for 2014 goals. The kids didn't always know what they wanted to do, so we helped the two younger ones by throwing out ideas. No bad ideas -- anything is written down. The older kids figured it out on their own, though I did give them a few ideas.

We picked goals from the brainstorming. I asked the kids, "From this list, what is the one thing that excites you most?" We wrote that thing at the top of a new list. Then repeated the process until they weren't excited about any of the other things. Now we had a list of actual 2014 goals.

We asked ourselves, "If I were looking back on 2014 a year from now, would I be psyched to have accomplished all of these goals?" If the answer was yes, we had our goals.

We came up with a plan for achieving the goals. The goals are great, but they don't happen by themselves. Some of the goals are daily activities -- draw every day, or practice Japanese or piano. Others are weekly -- go to yoga class once a week, or sew every Thursday afternoon. Others are big one-off projects, like do a science project or build a warlock kit (not sure what that is, but I'm excited to find out). We wrote down the plan for each of our goals.

We decided on accountability. So on the 1st of each month, we're going to meet as a family to do a status update on all of our goals. How did we do the previous month? And we have accountability partners that we're going to do a quick check-in with each Friday.

And that's what we did the last two days. I think it'll be good for the kids to learn about all of this, and I'm happy they're excited about what they're doing.

Is this the only way to unschool or learn about achieving? Not at all. But I think it's a fun experiment.

By the way, here are a handful of our goals (not all by one person):

Make music videos

Write a novel

Learn Spanish

Learn Japanese

Make one animation clip a month

Learn piano

Learn guitar

Make a warlock kit

Get cupcake business going (take online orders)

Do chemistry experiments

Meditate daily

Do yoga twice a week

Journal daily

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I was glad to read your 'oxymoronic' post; with you starting out saying you like letting go of goals and how you helped your family members formulate goals. I like this because as schooling families we want to give each child the chance to find out what best assists him/her in the pursuit of life. For some, it is goal making. For some, it is goal shaking. It is a true fit for all of us to stimulate finding out what works for each member of our family and to be understanding that there will be differences - not bad, just unique. I have found that I have had to step out of my own box for the sake of what's going to best serve the family as a whole and as individuals.

Thank you for this! So timely as we were just discussing today our thoughts, fears, desires and ideas for the future of this un-schooling experiment we are 1.5 years into. Up to this point I feel like we've been spending most of our time on re-training our brains and transitioning to our new lives. Last year my husband quit his job, we sold our house and moved to a new city. In hindsight I realize it was too many changes all at once (live and learn :)). We've all been craving a little bit more structure and purpose and this sounds like the perfect experiment to dive into at this point.

We really appreciate what you've started here and look forward to updates. All of these projects sound like so much fun (except for the "warlock kit" - I can't even imagine what that is). :)

Who wants to learn Spanish? My 10-year-old unschooled daughter has learned Spanish in the past year--we're living in Guatemala--and might be willing to correspond with one of your children in Spanish. Tell me more.

Read Next

When you start out as a new unschooling family, or even if you're just contemplating it, one of the biggest obstacles are not "how to do it" or "will this even work" but the other people in your life.

Your family and friends can be incredibly negative about the idea of homeschooling/unschooling.

And that's perfectly understandable, actually. Anytime we do something that's very out of the mainstream, we face resistance from others. Especially when it comes to raising kids, which is a hugely emotional issue for most people.

Last year was the first year I set goals, and even then, did so half-heartedly. My 'ambitions' as I called them at the time were to meditate daily and to buy less stuff.

Though I didn't meditate daily, I did develop a much healthier sense of gratitude and I am a better person for it. I may not take a moment each day to be grateful, but I became more conscious of moments to be grateful for. When I take time to be grateful it's like a successful fishing trip that serves as dinner. Recognizing the moments though is like finding a blackberry bush when I'm enjoying a walk. Both ways have provided spiritual sustenance.

My second goal, to be less materialistic, also was successful for the most part. I did buy a half dozen books this year and two articles of clothing, but in doing so I learned why I buy things and what ends they serve.

These two ambitions had their roots in minimalism, personal finance, and stoicism. That they were encompassed in broad domains was important. This year I thought about the domains first and settled on four areas: